A group of Canadian researchers, wildfire practitioners, Indigenous Firekeepers, and journalists has created a free, comprehensive resource to strengthen wildfire reporting.
Simon Fraser University made the “Covering Wildfire” toolkit as part of its Mitigating Wildfire Initiative, which was created to prevent catastrophic wildfires by transforming how Canada works with fire, according to the initiative’s website. The initiative specifically seeks to change the overwhelming flow of funding from suppression toward prevention.
The toolkit focuses on seven specific pathways for how journalists and media outlets can change their coverage of wildfires to reflect the realities and challenges that the natural phenomenon poses, including covering wildfire as a year-round story, highlighting resilient solutions, and improving collaboration between the media and wildfire agencies.
“The toolkit is a collective, co-created offering from the 50 folks who gathered at the bootcamp for other journalists across the nation, aiming to support them in telling this critically important story,” university officials said on the institution’s website.
Mitigating Wildfire Initiative Director Yolanda Clatworthy first unveiled the toolkit in June at a workshop in Calgary, where she told Wildfire Today it had been well-received. Both fire professionals and journalists shared how helpful it would be for their workflows, as well as for increasing trust and responsiveness within their communities. The toolkit was also presented at an interactive session at the IAWF international Wildfire Summit in Calgary in October 2025, and it has begun to help agencies and journalists outside of Canada as well.
“Folks in San Francisco at Red Sky Summit were also asking about it and saying how helpful it would be in an American context as well — a testament to the expanded reach and how much co-created outputs are needed,” Clatworthy told Wildfire Today.
